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How to Track Your Twitter ROI

Associate Editor, Mashable Recent Posts

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August 24, 2009

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“ Thanks for the great info Jennifer! I ...”

Tyler Carty

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If you're using Twitter for business, there will come a point when you, or those you report to, will want proof that your Twitter efforts have a tangible return on investment (ROI). Although the industry metrics for success are still being defined, the nature of link sharing and the opportunities of Twitter search create an environment ripe for tracking.

You'll want to sit down with your team to clearly define your goals, then survey the landscape of Twitter measurement tools, and merge the two to create and define reports that you can use to demonstrate real value.

1. Define Your Goals 

Before you dive too deep, take a step back and define what's important to your overall social media strategies and the company bottom line. Hopefully amassing a huge following on Twitter isn't your main priority, but you still want to be smart about tracking follower counts, and setting expectations for your team.

Realistic expectations, such as how many new followers you can expect per month, are a great way to help you further define your social media goals so that you can try different tactics to increase the percent change over time.

Your goals should be achievable and measurable. So if you want to use Twitter to increase traffic to your blog, define the baseline immediately, and tap into a URL shortener to get better insight into traffic that Twitter is driving your way.

Some of the Twitter goals you can measure include Twitter giveaways, hashtag campaigns, link sharing, retweets, referrers, total followers, total following, and tweets per day, week, or month.

2. Pick Your Tools for Tracking 

You'll want to create a system that really works for you and your small business. You can use a combination of the following tools to make sure you’re generating insightful graphs, demonstrating ROI, and tracking specific campaigns.

Trendrr: The perfect Twitter campaign tracking tool for small businesses on a budget. Use Trendrr to track Twitter search results over time, as well Twitter user stats for following, followers, and updates per day. You can use their graphs to visually track change over time. The matching Twitter post report is perfect for viewing tweet count fluctuation per day for the course of a campaign. Just make sure to start the tracking process when you're ready, as Trendrr only starts tracking when you tell it to.

Bit.ly: Twitter's most popular URL shortener gives you insight on how your shared links are performing. You'll get click data, referrer info, location graphs, and related conversations.

Tweetmeme: If your company has a blog, you can use the Tweetmeme retweet buttons to encourage visitors to retweet your posts, and then track shares via retweets and bit.ly analytics.

Hootsuite: This is a web-based Twitter client designed specifically with the professional user in mind. It's an all-in-one tool that can solve some of the immediate challenges you face with tracking your company's performance on Twitter. The application lets you save Twitter searches and groups as columns, embed your columns elsewhere, automatically feed your blog through Twitter, schedule tweets, and view user info.

Most importantly, HootSuite comes with a stats tab to give you insight into powerful Twitter statistics. Should you integrate with their URL shortener, you can view graphs and user demographics for users that click on your shared links. Also included are charts for clicks by region, top referrers, and stats on individual tweets.

Twitter Search: You can use the standard Twitter Search or one of the many different varieties like Twazzup, Collecta, or OneRiot, but you'll want to make sure you always have access to your ongoing search queries. TweetDeck, HootSuite, and Seesmic Desktop or Web are great Twitter clients with Twitter search already integrated.

The Archivist: Use this Windows-only tool to export Twitter search results. This is especially handy if you're conducting a Twitter campaign or giveaway using a hashtag or specific tweet criteria. You can then export the results to excel and slice and dice as you please.

ViralHeat: Though this tool is designed for web-wide social media tracking, it's also a great way to get insight into specific Twitter analytics. Use the service to create profiles with keywords, phrases, names, or expressions. You can even include standard search operators, and share data with team members by adding them to a daily email list.

ViralHeat then works to aggregate web data based on your profiles, so you can view total mentions, mentions per day, daily averages, total unique authors, most active Twitterers, count and percent of retweets, tweets with a link, and sentiment analysis. Prices range from $10 - $40 per month depending on profiles, but you'll find that it's a much cheaper solution compared to more enterprise level tools likes Omniture.

3. Prepare Your Reports

Once you've decided what you want to measure and how you plan to go about doing it, the final step is to set up ongoing reports to highlight your efforts. Of course, as you start to become a more sophisticated professional user of Twitter, and you get a better idea of performance and expectations, you will want to refine those goals and reports.

One thing to keep in mind is that many of the tools listed do the tracking for you, but they don't always organize data in a way that your boss or team members can measure against your goals. It might be a good idea to use your goals, create your own custom reports, and update them with the appropriate data on an ongoing basis.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, petrovich9

 

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  • Tyler Carty 1 year 6 months and 22 days ago

    Tyler Carty

    Thanks for the great info Jennifer! I thought you'd like this Twitter list that I found!http://virtualrescue.net/twitter-lists-twitter-tools-twitter-apps-free-twitter-software

  • ROSALIE KRAMM 2 years 8 months and 28 days ago

    ROSALIE KRAMM

    As a novice to the Twitter world, I thoroughly enjoyed this article. The question I have is how to measure ROI in the service sector market. I like using bit.ly in my blog posts, articles, and Tweets to see what my target audience is actually interested in reading so I can focus on subject matter that is going to draw traffic. As a small business owner, I very much appreciate all of the tips I can get from experts like Jennifer. Trying to think of how to use social media, including Twitter, LinkedIn, and blogging, to create traffic, and watching who is paying attention is priceless, because time is money and energy. I want to put my time and energy into "engaging" in social media that produces results.

  • PAUL ROSENFELD 2 years 8 months and 28 days ago

    PAUL ROSENFELD

    Jennifer, thanks for the response - and for sparking the original discussion. THis Open Forum needs more debate and less "one way" - I frequently find the comments as illuminating as the original post. Everything you write, and Jeff's points too, are good learnings. As usual, there's no single answer - as small businesses, we need to try to quantify things we do (tough, time-consuming and most don't have the expertise...but worth it) as well as not lose sight of the qualitative, squishier but still helpful measures. One of the things that rankles me alot is all the new software out there - Twitter, third party tools, whatever - needs a huge dose of usability improvement. Spending time with some of this is like root canal. In an world dominated by software we all need to up our skill sets. So I can think of a dozen ways off the top of my head that Twitter or a 3rd party could make a useful tracking tool for the little guys, but we'll save it for another day :-) Cheers!

  • Jennifer Van Grove 2 years 8 months and 29 days ago

    Jennifer Van Grove

    The challenge is (and I did try to point this out early on in the piece) is that every business/industry/sector will find different ways that Twitter can work for their business objectives. Follower quantity isn't going to be a priority, but defining what to measure, and why, does need to be driven by individual company objectives. The thing is that quantitative measurements can be very crucial to driving home the less measurable qualitative side of relationship building on Twitter...if you do a Twitter-only promotion, you can directly measure the results (especially if there's a coupon or code associated with the promotion). As community engagement grows, so to will the actual returns, but the investment is time and engagement will always be a challenge to measure.

  • JEFFREY MOLANDER 2 years 8 months and 29 days ago

    JEFFREY MOLANDER

    I agree with Paul. Respectfully, Jennifer, your title promises ROI tools but you acquiesce and provide common QUANTITATIVE Twitter monitoring tools. If we're going to progress as marketers we desperately need to STOP thinking tactically and quantitatively about digital marketing and focus on qualitative measurement that ties to strategic business outcomes. Just my two cents. I applaud Paul for calling for this and also for his willingness to discuss his triumphs. I'll be in touch, Paul!

  • PAUL ROSENFELD 2 years 9 months and 0 days ago

    PAUL ROSENFELD

    This is a terrific article full of tools I hope to check out soon, thanks for sharing! I think this article focused on what Twitter or these tools know - visitor usage type of statistics. The big missing ingredient is HOW Twitter actually delivers whatever end goal you're shooting for. In our case, we're using Twitter to search for new merchants to use our service, Fanminder. We've found several customers and are also signing up resellers this way. It's kicking butt for us. For us, the key metrics around followrs and so forth are just a stop along the way - rather we are tracking conversion rate: How many businesses following us are we converting to a sales call and then a customer once we can send them a direct message? I bet each business' goals leads to a different metric like ours, but please take your metrics much further to actual real results rather than intermediate metrics such as views, followers, etc. Hope this helps! Paul @fanminder.com

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